Sunday 30 October 2005

Holy poop

I’ve just installed the new Akismet anti-spam plug-in for WordPress. I’m not sure that I like the way that usage is conditional upon signing up for wordpress.com and downloading and using Flock – but it looks like it works. It’s cleared out nearly 4000 spam messages from the grayblog archives at the time of installation. Since then, I’ve been upstairs and taken a bath. In that time, it has detected and quarantined more than 150 new spam messages. Yikes.
Admittedly, most of these messages would not have come to my attention previously because my use of the WordPress blacklist feature actually picked out the vast majority of spam that I was receiving, but occasionaly something was getting through, and usually in large quantities at one time. This seems promising and I’ll report if there are any major new developments as I use it.
(Another thirteen in the time it took to type this – thank goodness for the auto-delete feature, which clears out any comment in the moderation queue that is more than a fortnight old).

Thursday 27 October 2005

Surf’s up

After literally months of waiting, I’m now using a 1mbps broadband connection after BT finally completed the upgrade last night. Ruralville has been lagging behind a bit compared to other communities in the area, mainly due to our remoteness from the exchange. But BT have recently upgraded the cables to the village in order to get our tiny school connected.
Of course, 1mbps will seem very slow to those people who live in major city centres and are getting speeds that are five or twenty times faster thanks to cable networks. The truth is that many rural areas barely have broadband at all and we are usually a long way down the queue for technical upgrades. Perhaps we will see faster radio-based broadband systems introduced in the near future – they’d certainly be useful around here and probably an awful lot cheaper to install.